this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

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Nuclear Power Is Hard. A Climate-Minded Billionaire [Bill Gates] Wants to Make It Easier. (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 6 months ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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The reactor being built by TerraPower, a start-up, won’t be finished until 2030 at the earliest and faces daunting obstacles. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission hasn’t yet approved the design, and the company will have to overcome the inevitable delays and cost overruns that have doomed countless nuclear projects before.

This is the kind of high-risk project where it makes sense to have somebody with really deep pockets financing it. There's a good chance that it's not competitive with the improved storage technologies which are likely to be available when the demonstration reactor is completed.

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[–] _noelamac_@spore.social 16 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

@silence7 I don’t think Gates is climate minded but instead pushes for nuclear because he’s aware of the main risk to growth of the tech industry: Shortage of clean energy to feed the growing and grotesque energy demand of data centers and AI.

To a tech-bro listening to lobbyists , „new“ nuclear seems like a good solution and even better if you intend to cash in some tax payer money while you’re at it. Risks and waste are secondary to them.

[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 5 points 6 months ago

There are other low-probability-of-success-but-amazing-if-it-works things he's put money into, notably some of the enhanced rock weathering studies.